The Independent Broadcasting Authority report released this week is an important step towards a healthy and open broadcasting system. The juggernaut SABC is to be reduced to a manageable size to allow space for other broadcasters. Local content regulations will stimulate the television production and music industries without being unachievable. Cross-media ownership limitations should help prevent a reproduction of the curse of the newspaper industry: domination by a few like-minded voices (see PAGE B5).
The overall vision is solid, though some of the detail is more hazy than one would expect after such a long gestation. Newspapers cannot own more than 15% of a radio or television station, defined as a controlling interest, if they have more than 15% of the newspaper readership in any particular area. How does one define newspaper readership? How does 15% become a controlling
Local content minimums are defined by air time? Does this mean that the broadcasters can do the cheapest and nastiest local programming locally, and save their expenditure for international material?
The IBA has also made one strange decision. It has given the SABC over two years before it cuts back to two channels and faces competition from private television broadcasters. This is misplaced protection of the institution. What the SABC needs is not coddling, but competition; it is unlikely that the standards of its work will improve until it faces a real challenge from the private sector.
We don’t have free and open broadcasting without a lively private sector — and we are being told that we can only have this element of democracy in 1998. And then only partially, with just one privately-owned
The IBA’s report came just a few days after Disney made its $19-billion dollar purchase of Capital Cities/ABC, the biggest ever media deal. The juxtaposition was appropriate. As South Africa was waking up to the new international information order, global media deals were changing the shape of the industry. The central question then, is whether the report prepares us to deal with this state of things.
In many ways, it does — if the world is prepared to wait until 1998.